Now in its 9th year, the upcoming incarnation of Manchester, England's Futuresonic festival could be the most innovatively programmed and conceptually integrated to date. Focusing equally on contemporary music and media art, the festival explores multiple intersections of the two through workshops, demos, artists' talks, panel discussions, and performances. Featured are two festivals within the festival: a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Technics 1200MK2, and a series of mobile technology adventures and installations located in and around the city. Venerable intellectuals and writers like Sadie Plant and Hugh Davies are finally scheduled alongside club genii like Greg Wilson and Andy Votel

I am confident to try new things. I operate in my stretch zone. My mind has unlimited potential. Do you feel your self-esteem soaring yet? British artist and well-wisher Carey Young thinks you might. Her

We've seen how advancements in genetic sciences have combined to result in genetically modified (GM) plants, animals, and now cloned humans. Artists have also engaged these developments, producing works that both celebrate and criticize the deployment of biotechnologies. The powerful information processing capabilities of silicon-based computing has enabled the sequencing and analysis of our genetic code, and that of many other organisms, but for the most part, the two components - biological DNA and information processing - have been considered independent. Well, according to Georgia Tech's Eugene Thacker in his new book Biomedia, that's all changing. The concept of 'biomedia' breaks down the traditional barriers between the biological body and technological machines. Not to be misunderstood as a furthering of the notion of the cyborg, 'biomedia' refers to emerging fields of research and development, like 'computational biology' in which information processing is achieved through biological means. BioPerl, a bioinformatics project based on the Perl programming language, is one example of such developments that leads Thacker to ask questions like 'What if 'life' turned out to be a form of computation?" - Ryan Griffis